What Epstein did not tell the subcommittee is that thousands of Vietnam veterans have been complaining of these very symptoms for a number of years, only to be given a Rorschach or Minnesota Multiple Personality Inventory (MMPI) test by VA hospital staff and sent home—or, all too often, to the psychiatric ward with a prescription for uppers or downers. Unfortunately Valium and Thorazine have not proven very effective in arresting liver cancer, and Gelusil (an antacid) seems not to have acted as an antidote to the destructive effects of TCDD on the stomachs, colons, livers, and even prostrate glands of many young veterans.
Although many studies have shown that TCDD is carcinogenic in laboratory animals and there is now suggestive evidence that “exposure to phenoxy acids and chlorophenols might constitute a risk factor in the development of soft-tissue sarcomas,”11 the VA has failed to conduct a national outreach program that might determine just how many Vietnam veterans are ill, have died, or may be dying from various types of cancer. With over a quarter million employees and a yearly budget of approximately $24 billion, the VA’s failure to do cohort studies, says Victor Yannacone, is based not on scientific caution but on a singular lack of compassion.
“I can go to my terminal in my little country law office in Patchogue,” says Yannacone, “and I can sit there and I can ask my relatively inexpensive computer to tell me the names and addresses of every veteran with testicular cancer. That is not terribly hard. I can tell the computer to tell me who had testicular cancer and the birth defects, and who was a Marine, and who served in a particular place during the month of January or February of 1968… It takes two minutes and forty-five seconds to get the answer.
“Why hasn’t the government done this kind of study? Because, quite simply, they don’t really think the veterans are that important; the Vietnam veteran is an expendable commodity to the US government.”
Yannacone, whose first brief against the manufacturers of Agent Orange was 184 pages long and contained “every piece of scientific data that was then known about dioxin or phenoxy herbicides,” believes that many veterans have already died from the “wasting effects” observed in rhesus monkeys by Dr. Wilbur McNulty and researcher Dr. James Allen. “People under the age of thirty-five don’t waste away and die with an autopsy report that says the veteran looked considerably older than his stated age of thirty-two years. He looks like a ninety-six-year-old mummy fresh out of the tomb. There isn’t a single piece of measureable fat on his skeleton. Now, that is ten years after his tour in Vietnam. What does that mean? It means somehow the amount that was loaded in his fat was mobilized and eventually killed him, and it killed him as if he had an acute dose years before. It just took ten years instead of ten days.”
Since 1949 there have been a number of accidents involving the release of dioxin at industrial plants throughout the world, the best known of which occurred at the ICMESA plant in Seveso, Italy, on July 10, 1976. The ICMESA plant was producing 2,4,5-trichlorophenol, and the accident took place in a chemical reactor. The explosion blew a safety disk out of the reactor, sending the bubbling brew up a venting pipe into the atmosphere, where it formed first a plume, then a cloud that eventually settled over a seven hundred-acre area where five thousand people lived and worked. Soon animals began to sicken and die, and those who were exposed to the dioxin-laden cloud suffered symptoms similar to those Vietnamese peasants had complained of following a defoliation raid; bouts of diarrhea, excruciating headaches, stomach cramps, dizziness, and sleeplessness.
During his tenure as VA chief, Max Cleland would on occasion draw Seveso from his grab bag of justifications for the VA’s recalcitrance on disability payments to Vietnam veterans who had been exposed to Agent Orange. Seveso, according to Cleland, only demonstrated that human beings can be exposed to dioxin without suffering demonstrably calamitous effects. This argument is fallacious for at least two reasons: First, because Vietnam veterans, unlike the victims of industrial accidents, were exposed to toxic herbicides over a twelve-month period and their exposure involved what scientists call “multiple routes”—which means that they drank water and ate food contaminated with dioxin, inhaled smoke from brush that had been sprayed with herbicides containing dioxin, swam in water polluted with dioxin, waded through brush coated with toxic sprays, and wore clothing for days, even weeks, which in some cases had been liberally doused with herbicides. Second, the accident at Seveso did have some very serious health effects on the residents of that community. In The Pendulum and the Toxic Cloud: The Course of Dioxin Contamination, Thomas Whiteside, who visited Seveso soon after the accident and again two years later, describes the aftermath of the explosion at the ICMESA plant.
Bird life appeared to have been devastated; fields, gardens, and orchards were littered with the carcasses of swallows, martins, warblers, and goldfinches, and also with those of thousands of rats, mice, and moles. Both brown field rabbits and white rabbits that residents of the area had been raising for food had been dying by the hundreds, and chickens by the thousands. Cats that survived were meowing piteously; dogs, which are known to be comparatively resistant to dioxin poisoning, looked sickly, and their behavior was reported to be nervous and aggressive.
…Inside Zone A [the zone closest to the reactor], the scene was desolate indeed, inhabited only by occasional hooded figures encased in impermeable white decontamination suits and boots and wearing face masks; scientists monitoring soil samples and veterinarians collecting dead animals in plastic bags. From time to time, shots could be heard as dying animals were put out of their misery and those still capable of moving were killed to prevent them from traveling out of the contaminated zone. Toxicological analysis demonstrated beyond doubt that most of the animals found dead had died from dioxin poisoning, and post-mortem examination showed extensive liver damage.12
Returning to Seveso two years later, Whiteside interviewed four doctors at Desio Hospital about their impressions of the effects of dioxin on the population. After explaining to Whiteside that they had requested qualified epidemiologists be sent to the area but “nobody has been sent so far,” the doctors said that, because of the lack of information on abortion rates prior to the accident, it was difficult to determine just how many spontaneous abortions had occurred since the accident. “Many spontaneous abortions had undoubtedly not been recorded as such, or perhaps even noticed by mothers if they occurred early in pregnancy,” the physicians said. They also told Whiteside about a small herd of cows fed grass grown in fields near the ICMESA factory. Thirteen of the cows had experienced spontaneous abortions, and out of three calves that were born only one survived more than a short time after birth. Because of the considerable amount of organic damage that had been observed in animals (dioxin had been discovered even in the livers of animals that had been considered healthy), the doctors felt it would make sense to assume that human beings would also have been affected by TCDD. In a study group of residents living outside Zone A, as well as some living in the upper half of Zone A, 35 percent of those examined had enlarged livers, said the doctors.13